Most photographers, including amateur photographers, utilize a lens cover when the camera is not in use to protect the lens from scratching, dirt, direct exposure to the sun, and the like. Such covers are usually solid disk-like members which either snap onto or screw onto the tubular lens housing or mount. The more ardent amateur photographer also often utilizes, as an accessory, a sunshade to prevent glare or light scattering primarily during outdoor photography. These devices can take on many configurations but are typically cylindrical or conical in nature and extend outwardly from and surround the lens to shade the same. Quite often these devices are, like the lens cap, threaded or snapped onto the lens housing or mount.
The separate nature of these accessories can cause the photographer difficulties and/or inconveniences. While the lens cap, when in place, will usually fit with the camera in a camera case, most separate sunshades will not thus necessitating a separate carrying means for the sunshade. In addition, the lens cap must be removed and set aside before any photograph can be taken. This not only gives rise to frequent misplacing of lens caps but it also often times causes the photographer to lose time and potentially miss the picture he wanted. If a sunshade would be desirable for such a quick-action picture, it would be next to impossible to remove the lens cap and mount the sunshade in time to snap such a picture.
Thus, the desirability of combining a lens cap and sunshade and providing some type of facile operation of the two is evident. Certain attempts have been made in that direction, such being typified by U.S. Pat. No. 3,715,149. In that patent a combined lens cap and sunshade is threaded onto the tubular lens mount and held in place by a set screw. Rotation of the sunshade on some additional threads opens and closes the lens cover. In addition to involving a number of working parts which must be precisely and expensively manufactured for use only with a lens mount having threads, the device of this patent is impractical because it constantly protrudes from the camera thereby prohibiting the storage of the camera in its case. Further, the set screw mounting does not fascilitate instantaneous removal if a photograph without the sunshade is desired nor instantaneous mounting if the converse is true. Another typical patent, U.S. Pat. No. 3,909,107, suffers from the same deficiencies. There too the device is suited only for cameras having threaded mounts and it at all times, when mounted on the camera, extends outwardly therefrom. In short, none of the prior art devices of which I am aware successfully combine a sunshade and lens cap into a unit which is readily attachable to or dismountable from a camera, economically and efficiently manufactured, and retractable, while mounted, so as to not inconveniently protrude from the camera.